On 7 June the Reform Act received the royal assent by commission. Grey had wanted William to give it in person. But, because he disapproved of the popular clamour, the king refused. It was perhaps his only false step in the whole affair. The new House of Commons, elected under the new franchise, was unencumbered by such fear of public opinion.
Two years later, on the night of 16 October 1834, the chambers of both Houses of Parliament and all the rest of the Palace of Westminster – apart from the Great Hall – were consumed by a raging fire. Reconstructing Parliament from scratch now ceased to be a disputed metaphor and became a practical necessity instead.
IV
William himself, now in his late sixties and beyond hope of legitimate children of his own, would not long survive the Reform Act. His health was declining and his tetchiness increasing. But he was determined to live long enough for his heir presumptive, Princess Victoria, to inherit the crown in her own right. For if he died before she reached her eighteenth birthday, a regent would have to rule in her name. And that person would be William’s detested sister-in-law and Victoria’s mother, Marie Louise Victoria, duchess of Kent. Contemplating the prospect of power, the duchess had become overbearing and nakedly ambitious. Outraged, nine months before the young princess’s birthday, William made an extraordinary speech to the court. He did not mince his words, saying that he was determined to prolong his life for a few months longer, for ‘I should then have the satisfaction of leaving the royal authority to the personal exercise of that young lady … and not in the hands of the person now near me, who is surrounded by evil designs and who is herself incompetent to act with propriety in the station in which she would be placed’.
William made it with days to spare. Victoria celebrated her eighteenth birthday (her royal coming of age) on 24 May 1837 and William, his goal achieved, died on 20 June.
Victoria was at Kensington Palace when her uncle died. And it was here that she had been brought up and educated. Her education was strong in foreign languages and traditional female accomplishments like drawing and music. But it had neglected the male curriculum of classics and mathematics.
On the other hand, her governess, Baroness Lehzen, whose ideal monarch was Queen Elizabeth I, had made sure that, despite the bias of her education, Victoria would be no meekly submissive woman. Lehzen brought her up to rule, and Victoria had the appetite and will to do so. She was also prepared for the necessary hard work. During the king’s illness, her lessons had been cancelled. ‘I regret rather my singing lesson,’ she said, ‘though it is only for a short period, but duty and proper feeling go before all pleasures.’ Just eighteen, she was showing the qualities that would define her reign.
The news that she was queen was brought at six o’clock in the morning by the Lord Chamberlain and the archbishop of Canterbury, who were received by Victoria in her dressing gown. And the contrast between the glowing young queen and the sombrely dressed, elderly male political establishment was only underscored by her Accession Council, which was held later in the day. The next day she presided over another council meeting ‘as if she had been doing it all her life’. All who saw her were bowled over by her confidence.
Particularly susceptible was the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. And the attraction was mutual. Charming, worldly wise and with the faint whiff of the danger of an ex-roué, Melbourne was the perfect mentor for the inexperienced young queen. He was also of the right political colour, since Victoria had been brought up as an ardent Whig.
The result was that the Tories soon called foul. But worse was to come when, only two years after her accession, Victoria displayed blatant partisanship during a ministerial crisis and wrecked a Tory attempt to form a government. Melbourne had won a crucial vote in the House of Commons by just five votes and resigned the premiership. Victoria, still under the sway of the paternal old politician, grudgingly offered the premiership to first the duke of Wellington and then Sir Robert Peel. Peel, not feeling it the right moment to take power, would accept only on the condition that the queen replaced the ladies of her household, who were all aristocratic Whigs. Victoria took great pleasure in refusing this disrespectful order, and Melbourne, against his better judgement, was reinstated as the queen’s pet prime minister. Even Whigs now had to acknowledge that a young, unmarried girl on the throne was a loose cannon.
But who was to be the husband? The front-runner was Prince Albert, a younger son of the duke of the little German principality of SaxeCoburg. The connection between the houses of Hanover and Saxe-Coburg was already strong, as both Victoria’s mother and her cousin by marriage were Coburgs. Moreover, when Victoria (who was highly susceptible to male beauty) had first met Albert some years previously she had been very taken by his excellent figure and rather ethereal good looks. But she noted his tendency to tire easily, in contrast to her own boundless energy.
Albert was exactly of an age with Victoria. But otherwise their early experiences had been very different. Albert’s father was an inveterate womanizer and, in revenge, his wife had taken a lover of her own. The result was divorce and Albert’s loss of his mother at the age of only five. His own upright morality was a reaction to this loss and to the loneliness of a motherless child.
The gap left by his mother had eventually been filled by Albert’s tutor, who discharged his duties with a rare zeal and thoroughness. He had also benefited from formal instruction, both in Coburg and later at the university in Bonn, which was then at the height of its academic fame. All this added mineralogy and science, anthropology, philosophy, literary criticism and music to the basic curriculum he had learned at home. And, despite his rather weak constitution, he was no milksop either: he was a competent fencer and an excellent shot. In short, he was the very model of an accomplished, modern prince for the nineteenth century. All that he lacked, as a penniless younger son, was a wife.
Victoria was in no hurry to oblige: she was enjoying the delicious freedom of being a young queen regnant far too much for that. Nevertheless, despite her conspicuous lack of encouragement, Albert was sent over to England to be inspected a second time. He arrived at Windsor on 10 October 1839. Victoria was watching from the top of the stairs and confided her feelings to her diary: ‘It was with some emotion that I beheld Albert, who is beautiful,’ she wrote with a characteristically heavy underlining. It was love at second sight, but none the less profound for that. And it lasted for both their lives.
In view of the disparity in their status it was Victoria who had to propose. They were married at the Chapel Royal at St James’s on 10 February 1840 and departed for a two-day honeymoon at Windsor. ‘We did not sleep much,’ Victoria noted of their wedding night. They revelled in each other’s sensuality. Albert helped Victoria pull on her stockings; she watched him shave. Unsurprisingly, then, Victoria conceived within days and gave birth to a daughter in November. A son, Edward, prince of Wales, came just eleven months later, followed by seven more children, with never more than two years between them.
And it was this uxorious bliss which began to alter the relationship between them. From the beginning, they had had adjacent desks. But Victoria had made it clear that, as was constitutionally proper, the business of queening was hers alone. Albert was allowed to blot her dispatches, but only as a concession.
But her repeated pregnancies, regularly followed by intense post-natal depression, began to swing the balance of power. And the change was completed by Albert’s increasing psychological dominance. She was tempestuous; he coldly rational. And he soon turned her temperament against her by making her ashamed of her uninhibited behaviour. The result was that Victoria not only became a submissive wife in private; she even surrendered public business to her husband, who acted as her private secretary with more power than any private secretary ever had. Once he had meekly blotted dispatches; now he dictated them.
This gave Albert a free hand to shape his own vision of monarchy. He had arrived in an England transformed by the Reform Act, which had created a new, pr
edominantly middle-class electorate. And he had quickly attached himself to the most intelligent politician of the mid-century: the Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel. Peel, himself the son of a cotton manufacturer, saw it as his mission to adapt the Tory Party to the new world of industry and railways, powerful manufacturing cities and bourgeois morality which we call the Industrial Revolution.
In pulling it into the modern world, Peel split the Tory Party, sending it into the political wilderness for two decades. But Albert succeeded in adapting the monarchy to the same forces beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. He began at home.
The young royal family would spend their summers at Osborne House, which Albert built on the Isle of Wight. Victoria’s uncle, George IV, true to his decadent nature and the flamboyance of the time in which he ruled, had summered in his holiday home, the Brighton Pavilion. With its exotic minarets and domes, it appeared to be the home of a fairy-tale oriental despot. At Osborne the contrast could not have been greater. In place of the fantastic architecture and fantastic expense all was sobriety and efficiency. The site was bought at a bargain price and building works completed to time and to budget.
But most innovatory was the layout. For Osborne is really two buildings in one. There was the Family Pavilion and the Household Wing. Servants and the business of state were shunted off into the latter, while the former provided the setting for ‘The Home Life of Our Own Dear Queen’ – which was really Albert’s creation and was a model of modern, almost bourgeois, privacy and respectability.
‘That damned morality would undo us all,’ snorted Victoria’s first, old-school prime minister. Albert, on the contrary, saw the ‘moral monarchy’ as the one means by which royalty could appeal to the middle classes, perhaps even lead them.
And central to this was the mid-nineteenth-century faith in progress and entrepreneurial zeal. In the previous century, the monarchy had been at the forefront of innovation, patronizing nascent industry and sponsoring scientific experiments. But many of the great advances of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century had been spurred by private effort. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce had been established by George III, but had slumped into dozy inactivity before Albert took over as president. Under his active patronage, it was revived with a successful programme of annual exhibitions of British manufactures.
Then it was suggested that the exhibition should become international to reflect the fact that one quarter of the world’s population was now ruled by Britain. Albert took up the idea enthusiastically. But it required all his drive and determination to overcome the obstacles and objections. The projected event was riddled with impracticalities and dangers. For it to work, suitable space in central London would have to be found and all the international exhibitors would have to be carefully managed. The pessimistic predicted that it would be a Great British farce. The unruly lower orders would riot; the fine elm trees on the Hyde Park site would be damaged; none of the 245 submitted designs for the exhibition building would work.
The day was saved by Joseph Paxton’s scheme for a prefabricated ‘Crystal Palace’ of iron and glass, like a gigantic conservatory. Albert took only nine days to get ‘the most advanced building of the nineteenth century’ accepted; seven weeks later the concrete foundations were laid and four months later it was finished. The statistics are staggering. The palace was 1848 feet long, 108 feet high (easily accommodating the threatened elms) and covered by 300,000 panes of glass. Inside, 1¾ miles of exhibition space displayed 100,000 exhibits from 14,000 exhibitors drawn from Europe and the world. Machines hummed and whirred; telegraphs and cameras showed what the future might be like; both finely crafted and mass-produced artefacts were proudly on display; and the produce of the world – the fruits of empire and free trade – were brought together under the glass. All this was seen by 6 million people, or a third of Britain’s entire population.
And it was all Albert’s work. In a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Albert said that the Exhibition pointed to the future of mankind – unity through communication and mutual understanding. ‘The Exhibition of 1851’, he said, ‘is to give us a true test and a living picture of the point of development at which the whole of mankind has arrived in this great task, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their further exertions.’
On 1 May 1851, Victoria, wearing silver and pink and with Albert at her side, opened the Great Exhibition. ‘It was the greatest day in our history’, she wrote, ‘and the triumph of my beloved Albert.’ The crowds came, but they were not disorderly; they were decent and respectable. The Exhibition, true to its commercial origin, turned a handy profit, which was put towards founding the Victoria and Albert, the Science and the Natural History museums.
Eight months later, on 3 February 1852, Victoria and Albert opened another, very different, building. Indeed, at first sight it looks as reactionary as the Crystal Palace was progressive. For when the rules were announced for a competition to rebuild the Palace of Westminster after the fire of 1834, it was specified that the design must be in ‘the Gothic or Elizabethan style’. The winner, Charles Barry, and his assistant, Augustine Pugin, responded enthusiastically, combining the native English Gothic with the resonantly patriotic Elizabethan; every inch of the building, inside and out, is a riot of medieval and Tudor-inspired ornament.
It is especially rich and colourful in the sequence of magnificent spaces which lead to the House of Lords. These were designed as a stage set for the state opening of Parliament and used for the first time by Victoria and Albert in 1852. Albert was heavily involved here also, as chairman of the committee that chose the artists and the subjects for the wall-paintings, which were likewise exclusively historical and allegorical. The enormous Norman Porch has a stained-glass window showing Edward the Confessor. King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are painted on the walls of the Robing Room, where the monarch assumes the royal parliamentary robes and Imperial State Crown prior to the state opening. Paintings of the victorious death of Nelson at Trafalgar and the triumph of Wellington at Waterloo line the Royal Gallery. From here the sovereign processes to the Lords’ Chamber, which was intended not only as a debating chamber, but as the magnificent climax of the state opening of Parliament. Stained-glass windows depicting the kings and queens of England and frescos with allegorical representations of Chivalry, Religion and Justice overlook the gold canopy and throne, upon which the monarch sits to open Parliament. Everything is crimson and gold and solemn splendour.
The result has been described and denounced as backward looking and Tory. Albert would have been astonished. He considered himself to be liberal, progressive and constitutionalist. He saw no contradiction between history and progress, or between the Crystal Palace and the Palace of Westminster. And he regarded the state opening of Parliament as the perfect reconciliation of medieval and modern, in which the institutions of English government showed themselves at once durable and flexible.
And the monarchy, as guided by his hand, was all of these things.
PART V
MODERNITY
Chapter 24
The Modern Monarchy
Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI
QUEEN VICTORIA DIED IN HER BEDROOM at Osborne, the seaside residence she and Albert had built together in the early days of their marriage, at half past six in the evening of 22 January 1901, with her pillow supported on one side by her doctor and on the other by her eldest grandson, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.
At almost eighty-two, she was the longest lived of any English sovereign and, with over sixty-three years on the throne, the longest reigning also. In her funeral procession through London, her coffin was followed by two emperors and the heir to a third, three kings, two crown princes and leading members of every royal family in Europe. Never had the world seemed so safe for kings. Less than twenty years later, however, this royal Europe tore itself apart in the holocaust of the First Worl
d War. It began with the murder of the Habsburg heir and it ended with the fall of all three Continental empires: the Russian, the German and the Austro-Hungarian.
Now only one Western king-emperor survived: Victoria’s grandson, George V of Great Britain. At the height of the conflict, in 1917, he had changed his family name to Windsor.
Windsor. The name, selected after careful consideration, is redolent of all things English. Shakespeare. Pageantry. Sweet, old-fashioned smells.
And the magic worked. Or something did. For, eighty years later, the House of Windsor still soldiers on, and George V’s granddaughter, Elizabeth II, still sits on the British throne.
This part shows how and why this extraordinary survival against the odds took place. It asks what the nation has gained as well as lost from the continuance of monarchy. And it looks to the future, if indeed there is one. Will green become the new royal purple? Or will the glory of monarchy finally fade away having bored us and itself to death?
I
In 1859 Queen Victoria was painted as she appeared at the state opening of Parliament: robed, diademed and glittering in diamonds, with her Speech from the Throne and the Imperial State Crown, made for her coronation in 1838 and set with the finest and most famous jewels of the Royal Collection, on the table beside her. Rising romantically in the background are the towers and spires of the Palace of Westminster, which she and Albert had opened in 1852 and which was at last nearing completion. No doubt the painter flattered. But the spirit is right. With Albert to guide and steer her, she was enjoying the giddy whirl of being queen.
Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy Page 55
